“Never, Rodney,” said Cis quietly. “I hoped you understood that.” “I understood that you wanted me to understand it when you told me you’d see me to say good-bye. You couldn’t have expected me to go off on a hint! Why won’t you marry me, Cis? You have changed enormously, but I know you’re not fickle, not easily moved, either way. You still love me?” Rodney pleaded. “No, Rodney, I don’t,” Cis said. “It amazes me to find that you stir memories of feeling, but no feeling. Don’t you think, perhaps, there is a reaction from intense pain that produces in the mind something like the immunity that a violent sickness produces in the physical system? I was dashed to pieces, and the reassembled person has lost the vibration to your personality.” “Merciful powers! Cis!” cried Rodney, honestly disgusted. “You talking philosophy, or psychology, or some other rotten, cold-blooded analysis! You, glowing, red-haired, my Holly? That high-browed crowd you’ve gone in with at Beaconhite have cold packed you!” Cis smiled faintly. “I’m no colder than I ever was--” “Except to me!” Rodney interrupted her. “Don’t tell me that I don’t remember--” “Except to you,” Cis interrupted in her turn, her color heightened. “I have grown up, and we are no longer possible chums. It happens often enough that people grow apart, even when they’re married. When it has happened to two people who are free, there can be, there should be, no talk of marriage between them. We must say good-bye, Rodney, as you came to say it.” “As you told me to come to say it; I didn’t mean to say it,” Rodney pulled on a chain from inside his breast, and held up to Cis her ruby holly ring. “I wear it, but take it back, Cis!” he begged. “Oh, the poor, lovely ring!” Cis cried. “I will never take it back. Oh, Rodney, we had not planned for the true Christmas when I wore that! Give the ruby to be set in a chalice, or sell it, and send the money to take care of some helpless baby who may never know that Our Lord was a baby! Let it make a trifling reparation for us both.” Rodney stared, but this suggestion seemed to convince him that between him and Cis stretched unbridgeable distances. “Well, you have got it bad!” he said slowly, not so much irreverently as in a puzzled way, expressing himself in the vernacular of his custom.